Wireless data usage has experienced, and continues to experience, significant growth. Some estimates provide for growth in data usage exceeding one thousand times current usage in the near future. Contributing factors to this growth include higher data usage on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, as well as the use of data in other emerging areas such as machine-to-machine (M2M), device-to-device (D2D), or other traffic types.
In particular the explosive growth of MTC will pose unique challenges with regard to access and signaling requirements for network operators. Further these devices are usually energy constrained and designed for low energy consumption thus channel requests for example, which usually use high output power for access bursts also pose a challenge. Further, data transfer from M2M devices is typically bursty with low-rate traffic, resulting in inefficient spectrum usage.